Women and Men in Renaissance Art The term “Renaissance Man” was coined During the Renaissance, a movement that took place from roughly 1300 to 1500 and means “rebirth. ” “Renaissance Man” is still used to today to describe a person who is creative, artistic, musical, and worldly and can seemingly able and willing “to do it all. ” However, it is important to note here that the term is clearly “Renaissance Man,” not “Renaissance Woman,” as during the Renaissance, it was men who were considered the great artists and creative geniuses.The Guerrilla Girls suggest in their “Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art,” that the masters of the Renaissance, (painters famous to everyone such as Leonardo, Michelangelo and Caravaggio) make it hard for “Renaissance Women” to gain visibility and it is only through them that we can find evidence as to what women were like during the Renaissance. There seems to be only a few well-known female artists from the Renaissance. These rare female artists depicted Renaissance women in a realistic and complimentary manner, showing them playing with their sisters or as strong characters from history.
But for the male masters of this time, it seems to be a different story. The woman’s role in the Renaissance was to be a child-bearer, a keeper of the home and a good wife. The family as a unit was vital to Italian society, and the class system of these families was in full effect. (Mandel). The Renaissance masters represented the woman’s role in very interesting and strange ways within their paintings. Even though women were seen as domestic creatures, rarely were they depicted in domestic settings.
Instead, they were shown as Biblical figures, in high society portraiture or, most interesting of all, as nudes portrayed in a very sexual manner. These representations are almost the exact opposite of their daily role and this could be an interesting examination on the psychology of the Renaissance male artist. It is possible that the representation of women were projections of what men wanted Renaissance women to be, or an unconscious rebellion of what society was like at that time.Whatever the reason, the depictions of women during the Renaissance are vital to the study of women in art as they reveal the way Renaissance life was and how women were viewed during these years. Artists of the Renaissance made names for themselves by gaining acceptance what is known as Artist Guilds. This allowed the craft of painting to be passed down from one artist to another, usually men.
Through these guilds, they were able to make money by receiving commissions from the richest members of society. (Guerrilla).There were also guilds for other crafts, such as cloth production, and it is no surprise that women were not allowed into any of these guilds. Instead, their focus was on the skills that helped them within the household once they were married, skills that were not hard to learn and thus left the difficult work to the men. (Chadwick.
) If a woman wanted to be creative, she most likely would have had to be born into a family of nobility. Many women of the Renaissance were illiterate or not well educated. They couldn’t make their own money and seemed to survive through marriage and raising a family. Guerrilla).
This all seems to be in deep contrast to the way Renaissance life is frequently portrayed, as a time of artistic development, exploration and achievement for everyone emerging from the Dark Ages. The real story is that only men enjoyed this time in creative ways and left the women at home to do the so called “dirty work. ” When Alberti, one of the first Renaissance men, wrote about art during the Italian Renaissance, he talked about painting as the ideal form. It is a second way of viewing the world and in turn, we as the viewer see the world through the painter’s eyes. (Alpers).Paintings in the Renaissance focused on the figure and the individual so we now get to see how male painters viewed people, most importantly, women.
We get to see Da Vinci’s Marys and Monas and Titian’s reclining nudes, two of the most well known Renaissance painters who painted polar opposites versions of the female ideal, telling in terms of the way women were viewed. Da Vinci’s masterpieces are an array of portraits and Biblical scenes and his depictions of women are intriguing and one-of-a-kind. In his infamous notebooks, viewers can see his intense practice and detailed work to get the hair, face and heads of his women correct.His Biblical figures are all very feminine and beautiful while the portraits of the rich seem a bit stiff and contrived. In his depiction of The Annunciation, Mary is shown with long hair, long fingers, full breasts and an inviting face. Her clothes are elegantly draped and she is pleasant to look at.
In another Biblical depiction, Da Vinci’s drawing of The Face of the Virgin, we see a young, beautiful woman with soft features, long curly hair and an adorned headband. Her eyes are closed, and her head is down turned.It is a gorgeous drawing and one that could be perceived as the way many women may want to look. His Madonna’s are always somewhat childlike, with “baby” faces and delicate features. They draw the viewer in by their innocence and beauty, as we look at the figures with much importance in the overall Biblical story.
Da Vinci’s portraits, however, tell a somewhat different story. Two of his most famous portraits are Ginervra de’Benci and Lady with an Ermine. When compared to the women of his Biblical paintings, these women seem stiff and unfeminine. They have harder features and somewhat sour looks.
Their breasts are tightly held down and the hair is tightly pulled back in strange, unnatural styles. One might argue that these portraits were done in this way because that is how they were commissioned, but it still gives evidence to the way women were viewed in high society. They seem uptight, uninviting and not “in on the fun” of the times. The last example of his portraiture is his masterpiece Mona Lisa, possibly, the most recognizable painting of all time. She stares straight at the viewer with that famous, unreadable smile. She too seems uptight, but in a different way.
Her eyes bring the viewer into her world. Perhaps this is a more accurate representation of Renaissance women? Since we know these women existed, it is interesting to compare them to Da Vinci’s depictions of the Virgin Mary, a person who cannot be truly identified by living witnesses. Da Vinci’s different portrayals of women lend more confusion to how women really were in the Renaissance, but he does offer some clues. David Alan Brown suggests in his article “Virtue and Beauty: Renaissance Portraits of Women” that portraits of women were most often reflections of their social status and roles of wife and mother.He states that many Renaissance painters depicted women as society’s idea of the “ideal woman” and it was important that she was shown in good character and with the correct social class.
This confirms the notion that women did not really look like the adorned women in Da Vinci’s portraits because virtue and beauty were the main themes of importance to those in the Renaissance. (Brown). The Renaissance man was an ambassador of beauty and it is no surprise that this came through in the depiction of women, no matter how unrealistic it may have been. This leads us into the opposite of Da Vinci’s women, Titian’s nudes.Titian’s representation of women is quite the opposite of Da Vinci’s depictions. In an effort to capture the women of the Renaissance, he went a different route and focused on woman as a nude figure.
In Rena Goffen’s article “Renaissance Dreams,” she suggests that Titian knew the power of sex and the female nude and used this knowledge to sway royalty who enjoyed looking at nudes to commission paintings of naked women from the artist. He wished his viewers to see his paintings as erotic. (Goffen). This is not necessarily surprising for the Renaissance period.
The human body fascinated Renaissance painters; it is natural that they would want to depict the female body is such ways. It is remains difficult however, to ignore the implications of Titian’s works. In one of his most famous pieces, The Venus of Urbino, he depicts a woman lying naked on a bed in the middle of the day, slightly covering her vagina but exposing her breasts fully. It is intended to be sensual and the Venus seems attainable, something that must have been encouraging for male Renaissance viewers. (Hill).
In the background, we see a sharp contrast of two clothed women rummaging around in a chest.The naked woman stares directly at the viewer, almost daring us to look at her. It seems unrealistic that Renaissance women would lounge around like that on a daily basis, but as stated before, this could be a projection of how Titian wished men to see his female models. A similar painting of Titian’s, Danae, again shows a naked woman lying in a somewhat similar position with breasts fully exposed. Here, however, she is not looking at the viewer rather, her head is turned upright, staring dreamily at the clouds coming into the room. She looks less feminine than he Venus of Urbino, but is another example of how Titian depicted women.
He mastered the female body and had no reservations about showing it as he saw them, though it is still difficult for us to conclude if this is how women made themselves visible to men in the time of the Renaissance. Finally, we make our way back to the female painters of the Renaissance, namely Sofonisba Anguissola, and how she depicted women in her art. Anguissola was one of the few whose father believed women should be educated and even sent one of her drawings to Renaissance master Michelangelo. Guerrilla). She is known for her self-portraits and as Whitney Chadwick suggests in her book, “Women, Art and Society,” she was successful at these self-portraits because she was “aware of her own image as an exemplar of female achievement.
” In Anguissola’s Bernardino Campi Painting she paints herself being painted by a man, a marvelous concept not seen before. Anguissola is more lifelike than Campi, who was her art teacher, and, as Chadwick states, is the first woman artist to address the issue of the relationship between the male painter and the female subject. (Chadwick).Another self-portrait of Anguissola is her sitting at an easel doing her own painting in what looks to be the Virgin Mary and Jesus. However, it is Anguissola that we cannot take our eyes off. She has a somewhat sad look on her face, and stares directly at the viewer, much like Titian’s nudes.
Anguissola is a woman fully clothed demanding the viewer to look at the work of art she is creating, not her nude body, a sharp and important contrast. In her most famous piece, The Chess Game, Anguissola depicts her three sisters enjoying a game of chess outside on a beautiful Italian day.The sister in the middle is staring at the sister on the right, who is staring at the sister on the left, who is staring at us. Each of these different points of view brings the viewer into the scene and making it active and interesting. As the sister on the left stares at the viewer, she moves a piece on the board.
It seems as if she knows she just won the game, and is letting us in on the joke. The sister next to her laughs at the sister who seemingly just lost and it is a fun, playful moment that almost looks like a modern day photograph.Perhaps this is the best representation of Renaissance women. This can easily be argued, as it was a Renaissance woman who created it. Who better to depict women of that time in the most realistic light possible? Perhaps they enjoyed the fun and creativity of the era as much as the men did, but there were not enough women artists at the time to represent it and leave a visual history.
Looking at the way women were depicted in the Renaissance gives us, as art historians, many intriguing clues to story of life during the Renaissance and how women were viewed at that time.Whether they were domestic wives, Biblical creations, nude figures or sisters playing chess, each representation is unique and reveals clues about what is was like for a woman to live during this period. The Renaissance is credited as creating some of the most famous artists and masterpieces of all time so the way women were depicted in these masterpieces is a vital piece of the history of women. Each representation is unique, and makes a different statement about womankind and how men viewed women during this uniquely creative period in history.
